January 04, 2007

I have heard about Nomad for some time now, ever since LotusPhere 2006 in Orlando in fact. Nomad is the feature that makes it possible to bring Lotus Notes on a USB stick where ever you go. I was wondering how this would work so now I have finally tried it and it works GREAT!

Chris and Susan Bulloch both recommends that this is only to be used with the Single Notes client install, not the full client. I had at the time testing this only access to the full client so that's what I was using.

A short summary of steps to install NOMAD on an USB stick:

Extract C94QIEN.exe or C94QAEN.exe to some folder. The purpose is to unpack all files and get to the setup.exe file.

Open a command prompt and get into the directory of the extracted files (the location of setup.exe). I don't know about this, but if you have a CDROM ready to be installed with setup.exe you should be able to put yourself into that directory aswell.

Put the USB stick into the computer and note the drive letter (ex. E:)

Type setup /a /v"NOMAD=1 TARGETDIR=F:\ /qb+" in the command prompt

Use autostart.exe to run Lotus Notes

If you're using the full client package doing this (on a simple install, no roaming) you will get access to both working admin and designer clients. Then just simply create different location documents for different Domino environments. You could for example point out your ID in the location document (advanced tab) for each domino environment and have your different ID's stored on the USB stick. Suddenly domino developers and administrators are no longer bound to specific computers!

Chris suggested as optional to remove some files to release memory, which I did. Remember however that if you are doing this with the full client you need some templates to be able to run the different clients. I had problems with the administration client. Some templates needed (but probably not all) were events4.ntf, domadmin.ntf and log.ntf. The admin client uses these templates on installation to create the corresponding nsf's. So a better thing to do is to remove the templates after installation.

To use admin and designer using only the single client installation, do as Chris suggests, follow Declan Lynch's advice.

Great feature! Could this be a competitor to the roaming functionality? (since this in my opinion has had some functionality problems and probably was released to soon).